Why popular bills die, or get gutted: a mystery — by design

SC Sen Gerald Malloy is frequently willing to be the front man for efforts to kill smart reforms, allowing other senators to hide their opposition.
Tim Dominick
tdominick@thestate.com

Columbia, SC

FIRST STORY: After six years of debate, the Legislature passed a bill last month to make moped drivers obey traffic laws. The vote was 68-31 in the House and 41-1 in the Senate.

So when Gov. Nikki Haley vetoed the bill, objecting (in the same way she objects to mandatory seat-belt laws) that it was wrong to make all drivers wear reflective vests and to make those younger than 21 wear helmets, you would have thought the only question was whether the House would be able to maintain the two-thirds margin to override her veto.

In fact, the House overturned the veto with three votes to spare. The problem was the Senate, where Gerald Malloy — who had been among the 41 who voted to pass the bill less than two weeks earlier — suddenly decided it was a bad idea, and made it clear during the Legislature’s June 15 veto session that he was going to filibuster if necessary to keep the Senate from voting to override the veto.

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After the Senate passed the ethics bills, most Democrats and more than a few Republicans started slipping out of the chamber, and about 10 hours after the day began, the Senate adjourned for the year without a quorum, leaving the moped veto intact.

Did those missing senators intend to kill the bill, or did they simply figure there would never be a vote, so there was no use sticking around as the clock ticked toward midnight? There’s no way to say for sure.

The architects of this switch explained that they wanted to negotiate a deal to pass both provisions, bypassing a senator who had refused to allow debate on the House bill. House members seemed to agree that this was a good plan.

It’s been a quarter century since then-Rep. Jack Gregory famously defended his vote against a bill he had introduced by telling fellow members of the House Judiciary Committee, “Just because you sponsor a bill doesn’t mean you support it,” but that sentiment is still alive and well at the State House, right along with its corollary: Just because you vote for a bill doesn’t mean you support it. And certainly the fact that you say you are for a bill doesn’t mean you’re for it.

These stories from the last day of this year’s legislative session are but the tip of the iceberg of the gamesmanship that — five years after Gov. Nikki Haley browbeat the Legislature into passing a law requiring what she calls “on-the-record voting” on all bills — makes it impossible in most cases to say who killed bills, or gutted them before allowing them to pass.

So when people ask who’s to blame for the fact that the new disclosure law doesn’t require legislators to tell us how much income they receive from lobbyists and businesses and organizations that hire lobbyists, all I can say for sure is that Sen. Malloy was the front man for reform opponents. Ditto when people ask who’s to blame for the fact that the so-called “reform” of the state Transportation Commission allows small groups of legislators to torpedo the governor’s appointments to the commission, without even taking a vote.

But Sen. Malloy can’t usually dictate the terms of legislation unless he has the support of a lot of other senators — senators who don’t have to out themselves as long as he’s willing to take the heat.

There’s no way to make legislators vote against bills they oppose, and I don’t know of any way to make people admit that they worked behind the scenes to water down bills. Negotiation, after all, is and should be central to the law-writing process, and the real negotiations are never going to take place in public.

But if the Senate made it easier to get bills up for a vote — by eliminating the single-senator blockade, for example, or reducing the amount of time that can be spent on any bill without an affirmative vote to extend the debate time — that would reduce the opportunities for legislators to secretly sabotage legislation.

And that would reduce the number of good bills that die or suffer grave injuries for reasons we cannot document.

Ms. Scoppe writes editorials and columns for The State. Reach her at cscoppe@thestate.com or (803) 771-8571 or follow her on Twitter @CindiScoppe.

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Cindi Ross Scoppe has been The State’s opinion writer for 20 years, providing a pragmatic approach to SC state government; she was a reporter for 10 years before that. Her last day is Aug 31. Today she says good-bye.